We all participate in food art of some level. Food preparation is a craft itself. And what terrific meal goes undocumented by our skilled-up phone camera and a little creative staging? Our attachment to food and food products often necessitates a system of memento. Sometimes, that means the labels, bottles, or containers themselves make their way into our collections. Sometimes, you have to take it a step further and refabricate the object yourself. It’s like a way of re-experiencing the joy of the asset, multiple times over.
A fiber or plush version of a food object – a soft homage to the delight of sustenance – is a particular joy for me. When I came across chef and writer Kiki Aranita’s crochet works at a cookbook event at the Italian Market’s dedicated cookbook store, Binding Agents, they fed something in me. I think it was that essential re-enactment of eating or preparing food. The crochet pieces, framed and hung on the wall, were approachable but also felt rife with metaphor, so I wanted to ask Aranita about any of the ways the art-making and food-making practices felt connected. We caught up several weeks after the event and Aranita was very generous with her insights into family influence (or lack thereof) on our artistic tendencies, distinctions between art and craft, and thoughts on fine dining as a mode of artmaking. Here is an edited transcription of the conversation.
Brigid O’Brien: I understand that you have created crochet pieces of varying styles and imagery, but the ones I initially came across were ones you produced as replicas of food objects. Do the food pieces satisfy something specific for you?
Kiki Aranita: I have made the odd sweater, and right now I’m working on a blanket because in my day job, it feels like the world is burning. I wanted to make the most comforting thing that I could imagine. I only work with scrap yarn, so it’s like a very chaotic blanket. During the pandemic lockdowns, I traded ideas and thoughts constantly, all throughout the day with my friend Caitlin McCormack, who is a much better fiber artist than I am, and much more interesting and has far more insightful thoughts on craft versus art than I do. Caitlin and I would make things together, but separately. For instance, Caitlin would crochet a skeleton and set it in glue. It’s a long story, but I really love bunnies. All of my [crocheted] bunnies were in a sense, self portraits. Some are pretty violent. There’s one where the bunny is stabbed through the mouth and through the back of the head with a carrot. I made a lot of bunny heads impaled by carrots. Since this was the pandemic, and I was frustrated with everything, I channeled all of my frustrations into these bunnies’ faces. Caitlin and I made a few different sculptures with these bunny heads and crocheted skeleton bodies.
I had been away from my family for a while [at that point], and I missed very specific foods I couldn’t get, so I started crocheting the things that I missed. I also tried to recreate things that were flat, in yarn. I recreated Lion Coffee’s old branding and Korean melon pops called Melona. And I wanted them, so I crocheted a version. It’s not as delicious, but it’ll do. I found Spam to be particularly fun to crochet and get into the details of. Like, wait, why is there broccoli on a Spam can? But there is broccoli, and there’s cauliflower…and I was looking at packaging in a way that I never did before.
Brigid: Can you share how food and art are part of a family tradition for you, if it all? Do you feel that they inform one another?
Kiki: They are rejections of my family. I did not grow up in a family that cooked at home. I grew up in Hawaii and Hong Kong and in both places, we went out to eat a lot. In Hong Kong, it’s quite normal to employ a cook at home. So while I do have some family recipes from aunts in Hawaii, and a couple that were always made at home at Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, I didn’t come from cooking families.
I also don’t come from families that value craft, at least not this type of craft. On my Hawaii side, I have a huge family, and everybody’s really good with their hands. My grandfather was a prolific painter. I come from a line of people who, if they envision something, are able to just make it. But these skills were hobbies. The way that I approach food and art has been an extreme anomaly, and I like to think that these things are entirely mine and have nothing to do with my family.
Brigid: Do you think that presenting food as art influences how we interact with it? Does it make us take it more or less seriously, does it help us to metabolize its role of pleasure in our lives?
Kiki: I think for the most part, once you start to equate food with art and treat chefs as artists, food becomes something for only a certain set, that is, the people who can afford to go to fine dining restaurants, who can think of food as something other than sustenance. And of course, that’s incredibly problematic. This is not the case for all food. I think, for example, what Omar Tate is doing at Honeysuckle isn’t necessarily to elevate food to the point where it’s art and only able to, like, only certain people who can afford it. He does a good job of questioning, “Is this valid? What can I use art for?” For him, food is just another medium of art. But in general, I think when we start to think of food as art, it becomes very inaccessible to a lot of people.”
Brigid: Philly is so special, and its cultural infrastructure offers a lot of discussion around art and food that I think is worthy of urban study. Philly loves to dine. Do you think its residents love art as much as food?
Kiki: I think Philly loves public art. Philly is very, very proud of its murals, and I think it should be.
But often work tends to fetch higher prices or get more attention when we take it to New
York or somewhere else. I think that happens in both food and art, leaving the city legitimizes the work that we do.
Brigid: Are you able to articulate any ways that food preparation and crochet work feel related, in a tactile sense, or through process?
Kiki: There isn’t a week that goes by where somebody doesn’t send me a video of ramen being crocheted or knit. So there’s that. But in terms of cooking or writing a recipe, I first do it in my head. I know how these ingredients will work together, but I don’t know how they will all work together in this particular context. I have two margins going where, I taste and scale and try to figure things out. And I think writing a pattern would be similar to writing a recipe, which is another reason why I reject patterns in my crochet, because I have so much more freedom [without a pattern].
When it comes to recipe development, I have to be very precise, and test recipes many times. It’s work that I enjoy, but I do sort of play scientist a little bit. I also have to think, how are other people going to replicate this? What are they going to be able to do in their kitchens? Just like when you write a pattern, you send it to testers.
But when I’m cooking at home, making dinner for me and my husband and my dog, I can just make it. And if it’s good, like, it might be only good that one time. Cooking that way can be singular and so fleeting. I feel like that same sort of freedom with crochet and I love it. More than that technical side of cooking, which is more like recipe development and, which I would associate with work.
Kiki Aranita’s crochet pieces can be found at kikiaranita.com
About the author
Brigid O’Brien (she/her) writes features about art being made and shown in Philadelphia that is sometimes overlooked or not traditionally covered by mainstream media. Her intention is to put spotlight on these practices. Sometimes she also writes reviews.
